Friday, January 9, 2015

By Pastor Stephen Feinstein

Hello everyone, with the new year, I am going to give my
blog another try. My goal is to post at least once a week, and so please check
back at least that much if you wish to follow along. Last year I started to
summarize the Complete Works of Francis
A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview. The reason for this is simple.
Schaeffer was a brilliant Christian of the 20th Century, and he took
the Christian worldview and rightly applied it to all aspects of the Christian
life. How we think, how we feel, how we sing, how we write, how we do art, how
we communicate, and all other things are to be distinctly Christian. Worldview
training is something that is lacking in churches across the land, and so I
thought I would take up that battle here with this blog. Thus far we have been
going through Schaeffer’s book, The God
Who Is There, where he traces how Western Civilization lost its way, and
responds by giving the solution. So we will pick up where I last left off.

After explaining very precisely what man’s dilemma is as
well as God’s solution to our dilemma, Schaeffer then moved to the next logical
question. Is it true? If so, how do we know it is true? His chapter on this is
very insightful. After all, what this question is really asking is whether or
not the gospel is really true? If so, how can we know it?

He begins with an illustration. Imagine that you have a book
in an old house, but each page is radically torn to where there only exists a
paragraph for each page. With the tattered book, no man could reasonably know
what the story is about. It is unintelligible. Of course, a handful of things
could be learned from the existing scraps, but the story of the book could not
be discerned. One thing that would be obvious is that the fragments of writing
on each page are not the product of random chance or time. They are obviously
products of design, but due to the tattered nature of the book, no one could
know what the purpose of that design was. Well, what would happen if in the
attic of the house there were hundreds of torn pieces of paper that apparently
match the pages torn out of the book? And what would happen if after taping it
all back together, the new paragraphs mixed with the previous ones give a
coherent story from start to finish? Would we not conclude that we have the
full story and purpose of the book? What else could we possibly conclude if the
following two facts are true? First, the torn pages outside of the book match
the torn pages inside of the book. Second, once the book was reassembled there
exists a perfectly coherent story. Would we not be forced to conclude that
these two facts are indisputable evidence that the torn pages outside of book
truly belong in the book and reveal the true purpose and explanation of the
book? Any rational person would have to agree.

In Schaeffer’s illustration, the ripped pages in the book
represent the abnormal universe and the abnormal humanity that now exists. A
universe that is orderly, and yet is headed toward entropy (self-destruction),
and an immoral humanity with moral absolutes is clearly abnormal. A mortal
humanity that has immortality on its heart is also abnormal. Clearly, if we
only had an abnormal universe and an abnormal humanity to study, then we would
be like the person trying to understand the tattered book by only reading the
fragments left within the broken book. We only could know that the pieces we
can see are not random, but other than that we could not the know the story or
the purpose. The Scriptures are the torn pieces found in the attic. With them,
all the pieces come together. It explains all that is missing from the tattered
book, and it coherently makes sense of everything. It defines the problem, and
it shows the solution. It enlightens us to what went wrong and how it will be
fixed. More than that, it accurately addresses the obvious abnormality of the
universe and man, explains the cause, provides the meta-narrative that
illuminates the solution, and it does this without true contradiction. No other
worldview even comes close to doing this.

Materialists simply stare at the abnormal universe and abnormal
man and try to reason from that starting point. When they do so, they do it in
a way that causes them to deny the obvious traits of design that are apparent
in the universe and man. Other religions are no better. They do not get the
dilemma right, and therefore they do not offer any real solution. Only
Christianity provides the explanation. Schaeffer writes, “The question is
whether the communication given by God completes and explains the portions we
had before and especially whether it explains what was obvious before, though
without an explanation – that is, that the universe exists and the universe and
“mannishness” of man are not just a chance configuration of the printer’s
scrambled type.” To put it another way, Christianity alone is like the
situation where the torn pages outside the book match the pages inside the
book. Furthermore, it alone creates a coherent story once it is combined with
the pages inside the book. These two facts are indisputable evidence that the
Bible is what it claims to be, namely, the Word of God.

But it is important to move beyond illustrations and discuss
the nature of proof. Scientific proof, philosophical proof, and religious proof
all follow the same rules. In each of these fields, we have many problems that
we wish to solve, and thus once we define the question that we seek to answer,
the nature of proof consists of two steps. First, our theory must be
non-contradictory and must give an answer to the defined question. Second, we
must be able to live consistently with our theory. In chemistry, our theory
about a given chemical reaction must conform to what we see in the test tube.
Likewise, the explanation concerning abnormal humanity must conform to what we
observe at large in man, especially with his behavior.

If you assume the atheist position that impersonal time plus
chance have produced personal man, then you have a problem. Your theory runs
against all experience and observation. Furthermore, it requires a leap of
faith to believe impersonal foundations can create personal beings since such
has never been observed. All experience shows that persons come from persons.
We have seen farmers create a farm, but we have never seen a farm create a
farmer. We have seen people create factories, but we have never seen factories
create people. So against all experience and observation, the materialist must
appeal back to some single event where the opposite allegedly occurred, and
somehow started the chain reaction of personal foundations now leading to
persons. For sure this is a metaphysical position rather than one of physics.
Furthermore, it must cling to irrationality at its core. An impersonal universe
mixed with impersonal time and impersonal chance has no true direction and no
true purpose. Thus, it has no rational basis, but instead is by definition
irrational. And yet the atheist seeks to be rational in his thinking, in his
understanding of science, and in his social opinions. Clearly, the
atheistic/materialistic answer to the question of the abnormal universe and
abnormal man cannot be lived out consistently. It does not match what we see in
the real world. It does not match our experience. It is inherently irrational,
and therefore it is received by faith. It is no better than the mystical leap
that was taken by liberal theologians.

This is compounded further when one observes how the
materialist lives. If the materialist is right, then man is nothing more than a
machine. We are nothing more than matter governed by impersonal chemistry. This
then would make our personhood actually an illusion since everything that makes
man is truly impersonal. Yet, does the materialist live as though our
personhood is an illusion? No. As
Schaeffer said, “He may be one thing in the laboratory, but something
completely different when at home with his wife and children.” In other words,
he loves them, he kisses them, he sacrifices of himself for them because his
very actions show that he knows they are persons that are more than machines.
They are deserving of dignity, and he gives it to them. He loves them. This is one
more piece of evidence that the materialist cannot live according to his
worldview. He must borrow from the Christian worldview every single day just to
be able to live his life as he now does. And this is not just the experience of
any given materialist, but this is the universal experience for all humanity as
far back as we have records. Ancient burial sites, cave drawings, and general
artifacts of so-called primitive man all demonstrate that humans have always
lived as though we are not machines. We have always lived as though we are
truly persons. We have always lived as though we possess intrinsic dignity. How
can this be if the materialist is right about his theory?

Christianity begins with the existence of the
infinite-personal God and man’s creation in His image and a Fall that happened
in space and time. In its presentation of this, God’s Word is without
contradiction. Furthermore, Christianity presents an answer that is livable.
Its answer matches daily human experience. Its truth allows for the increased
knowledge of man, the pursuit of scientific discovery, and yet it also accounts
for the fact that something is greatly wrong with us. So why do atheists reject
the truth? It is because they accept without any question their fundamental
assumption. They assume, or better put, they believe by faith, that there
exists a uniformity of nature in a closed-system. By faith they believe that
uniformity exists without explanation, and that the universe is a closed system
with no outside actor. Transcendentally this is impossible, and therefore some
materialists these days are appealing to a multiple universe model, but that
too fails. It is nothing more than an escape device that supposedly bails them
out of their groundless position.

So in the end, what is it going to be? Unbelieving man is
left with either rationalism or irrationalism. Rationalism is the idea that man
can autonomously learn truth, meaning, and purpose to the universe with his own
intellectual faculties alone. Human finitude makes this impossible. We are too
limited to justify true knowledge due to our lack of omniscience. Thus, others
embrace irrationality. Irrationalism is the idea that there is no meaning to
anything, and human reasoning is incapable to proving the contrary. So we are
left with skepticism then. Yet, no one lives this way. Even the skeptic walks
around as if he knows things and interacts with the world as though there is
meaning and purpose. So he too is wrong in his assumption.

The Christian is not in the same sad state of groundless
epistemology. We are rational, though not rationalists. We know A is A and A is
not non A. We believe in reason. The difference is we know that reason cannot
begin with man. Reason exists because God exists and He created the world
reasonably and created mankind to interact with the world using reason. This is
why humans can know and learn things despite our finitude. We do not need to
embrace purposeless irrationalism. And we can justify the existence of rational
thought. Once again, our worldview alone makes sense of everything we see in
human experience, including even the ability to reason.

Schaeffer provided a very strong and rational basis for
Christian belief with what he wrote in this chapter, and at the same time he
savaged unbelieving thought. Yet, he also did not want anyone to miss the big
point of it. All of this is meant to cause us to marvel at the wonders of God
who made all that we see, and who is the ground for all that we experience. May
we praise the God of the Bible. May we ever draw closer to Him in worship and
adoration. Amen.

Followers

About Me

Stephen Feinstein is a pastor at Sovereign Way Christian Church in Hesperia, CA and a Chaplain in the United States Army Reserve. He loves the Lord, seeks to grow in His Word, and labors to see the flock grow in the Lord.